Friday, July 11, 2008

We planted/had our gardener plant a small vegetable garden with tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage. Since we are living in our own-created small community of Tom and his wife, Judith the housekeeper, and Grace the nanny, our thinking was we’ve always loved the idea of growing our own vegetables, and everyone else would as well.

So I bought seeds for some vegetables I knew and recognized. Tom also planted something called mchicha, which is a locally eaten spinach-type green, tembeye, a sort of sweet potato, and corn.

The irony is, the 85% of the country’s GDP is agriculture-based, and the same proportion of the populace are small farmers, with most being subsistence farmers. They grow what they need to live. People behind walls with staff in the house don’t grow vegetables, they buy them. But I’ve always had the organic farmer fantasy without the energy or enthusiasm to actually weed and care take a garden. This garden-delegation project seemed like a dream realized.

We planted in April and it’s now been a few months. The tomato plants are diseased, with a white powdery looking fungus on the leaves, and a fair number of small green tomatoes that have been small and green for some time, and don’t seem inclined to ever get big or red. The pepper plants produced a few gumball-sized green peppers, suitable for stuffing with a single small mushroom, or a half-teaspoon of breadcrumbs. The cabbage refused the invitation to even venture out of the soil.

It is funny that in the midst of my thinking through various work and occupation options here, it is easy to strike the entire gardening/organic-farming category right off the list.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

A few things have gone missing around the house – Hillary’s Walkman that she uses for running can’t be found. She has somehow managed to lose two new blackberry phones in the past few months. More disturbing, her wallet seems to have been riffled. Hillary asked if I had taken money as the bills were turned in a different way than she puts them in (this is the wallet that has been with her since college, so she has deeply formed habits about its usage.) Two weeks ago, Hillary had an advance of three hundred dollars for a trip she was about to take. The day after getting the advance, she went for lunch and there were only two one hundred dollar bills in her wallet. Last week, she received her monthly local draw, the portion of her salary that is supposed to see us through the month. That envelope, containing $1,000, was gone the next morning.

We had started wondering who might be pilfering and ran through the list of every potential suspect. Was it someone from Hillary’s office? Was it Judith, our lovely housekeeper? Under that warm, caring façade, could she be nabbing our cash? Or Grace, who we entrusted with Bodie? And on and on.

It was a rough period of a few weeks, feeling betrayed, not knowing by whom, and feeling uncomfortable around the house. We assumed it was someone at Hillary’s work place, so Hillary held a meeting of her key team at the office to figure out who could be stealing. But when the thousand-dollar envelope went missing, we sat and, like good CSI-devotees, figured out a minute-by-minute scenario of who could have had access and opportunity.

Hillary received and signed for the envelope at 5:30 pm. She discovered it missing at 11 am the next morning. So we traced her steps: upon receiving it, she put it in her bag, which was by her feet, and worked until 6:45 pm, whereupon she left for home. By the time she got home, Judith and Grace were well gone for the day. The bag went on the kitchen counter by the door, where it goes every night. She left for work the next morning at 7:45 and had her bag with her until she looked for the money at 11 am.

There didn’t seem to be any opportunity for anyone, even a knowing and stealthy financial person, to grab the envelope at the office. But how could it have happened at home? Judith and Grace were gone, and no one else came in the house.

Hillary called me at home that morning and asked me to check if it were possible to reach in through the kitchen window to the bags on the counter. I tested the theory, and it was not only possible, it was easy.

Ok, the money was taken between 7 pm and 7 am, and the window in the kitchen seemed to be the point of access. That narrowed the list down to three, Sebastian, the night guard, who I’ve referred to as the happiest man on the planet, Tom, the devout seventh day Adventist gardener or his wife, Martha. If it were Tom or Martha, Sebastian would have to have watched them pad over to the kitchen window and either just let it happen, or collaborate. If it were Sebastian, he knew when everyone was asleep, had the role of walking around the house to check things out, so needed to be by the kitchen in the middle of the night, and knew everyone’s habits. It seemed to be coming clear.

My plan was to wait a week, put another envelope in the bag, and I’d sneak into the kitchen in the dark and wait, stealthily (and hopefully awake) through the night to capture the culprit in the act.

We called Knight Support, the agency that provides security and for whom Sebastian works, and told them of our suspicions. The operations head asked us if anyone else lived on the property. We told him Tom and Martha did, but that it would be both very difficult for them, and we had huge trust in them. He asked where they were from. When we said Malawi, he responded, “That’s all I need to know.” And launched into a diatribe against Malawians, the vehemence and nature of which I’d only seen in movies and footage depicting prejudice a century ago. We told him that it was possible, but highly unlikely given his devout church-going nature and lack of opportunity. “Those Malawians are like that, acting one way and stealing from right under your noses,” he said.

That night, Knight Security had a new super-askari, James, at the door, and sent a local supervisor to bring Sebastian back to the main office. I never got to enact my catch-‘em in-the-act plan.

We’ve thought about this a lot. The initial anger at being betrayed was quickly tempered by putting ourselves in his shoes. If I earned 80,000 shillings a month, or about $850 per year, had a wife and 4-year-old son, and access to $1,700 (the total amount we think was taken, not including the stuff), would I reach through a window in the middle of a long, dark and lonely night? The temptation of two years salary coupled with the need to provide for a family on $75 per month makes it hard to be outraged.

It is the mix of relationship and need that makes easily reconciling this difficult – Sebastian brought his son over one Sunday; he made little bicycle-men for Bodie; and repeatedly listened patiently as I struggled to form sentences in Swahili. He also apparently quietly pocketed money and things that he assessed, probably rightly, that he needed far more than we did.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Bloodied but unbowed, I refuse to let those toddlers get me down. Today found some redemption. With Thursday camp being at George and Mie’s house on the beach, I wanted to take advantage of what the kids wanted to do anyway. After the morning singing circle, I passed out an empty jelly jar to each.

The tide was low, leaving countless shallow tidal pools. The kids waded into the tidal pools (each with a nanny) and looked at small darting fish, scurrying hermit crabs, shells, and floating forests of seaweed. Nannies and children chased small fish, wading from rock pool to pool. The exercise, planned for 30 minutes, went for over an hour as kids ran and splashed and filled their jars.

They came up from the beach for snack time, wet, diapers full of seawater, giddy with playing in the ocean, carrying jars with small fish. The arts and crafts activity was construction paper with crayons and stickers in the shape of, yes, a fish! The day was thematically coherent (always essential to a two-year-old), and seemed, for the first time, to fly by.